Racing the Republic: Ethnicity and Inequality in France in American and World Perspective - At U.C. Berkeley, September 7-8

An international and interdisciplinary conference at the University of California, Berkeley, September 7-8, 2007, at Lipman Room, Barrows Hall, organized by Loïc Wacquant (Sociology, UC-Berkeley), Tyler Stovall (History, UC-Berkeley), and Heddy Riss (Center on Institutions and Governance, Institute of Governmental Studies, UC-Berkeley)

Questions of ethnoracial division (linked to slavery, colonial rule, and/or immigration), citizenship, and politics loom large today not only in the United States but also in many other advanced nations. None is perhaps more urgently concerned with these issues today than France. And none provides a more fruitful comparative case with the United States, since the two republics share a germane commitment to the democratic ideal and a common claim to embody civic universality. The conference brings together leading and rising scholars from the gamut of the social sciences and humanities who are engaged in the resurgent debates on colonialism and postcolonialism, immigration and racialization, urban issues, public policy and citizenship in France, to compare and contrast those with parallel debates in the United States.